Begin the Begin by Robert Dean Lurie

Author:Robert Dean Lurie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Rock Music, Biography
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
Published: 2019-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

Carol Levy. Photo courtesy of Paul Butchart.

Carol Levy’s spirit hangs palpably over the origins of the Athens music scene virtually everywhere you turn. It leaps from the few photographs of her that are in circulation; the one I’ve seen most often is a blurry black-and-white shot in which an impossibly young-looking Levy stares out from under a Beatles-style mop-top—young-looking, that is, apart from her eyes, which seem defiant and a little sad. Then there are the pictures of her band Boat Of, in which the young artist’s expression in each freeze-frame seems to encapsulate, in bandmate Tom Smith’s words, her “disdain for the easy and the obvious.” It’s easy to see why she got on so well with Stipe; she seemed to embody that iconoclastic Patti Smith–style energy that had so captured him when he first heard Horses. “Carol was fearless,” says Ingrid Schorr. “That’s the word that comes to mind. She was outspoken and quick-witted and I don’t think I ever heard her express a doubt or hesitation . . . She made gazpacho once out of a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and a chopped-up onion . . . She used a paper lunch bag for a purse . . . I loved her a lot.”

It was not until 2011 that Michael Stipe said anything much in public about his relationship with Levy, and even then he did not mention her name. But anyone from the Reed Hall days who read Christopher Bollen’s piece on Stipe for Interview magazine knew exactly who the singer was talking about. The context for his comments was a question about past drug use. “I stopped taking drugs [in 1983],” Stipe told Bollen.

There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn’t cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, “That’s it,” so I quit then. It was horrible. A bunch of people died around that time and she was one of them. I wrote a song about her—that was when I still did pull from autobiographical material. I didn’t really have my voice until after that.

The song in question is “Camera,” which would appear on the band’s sophomore album, Reckoning. In the recorded version, Stipe sings, “When the party lulls, if we fall by the side,” which is most likely a reference to those fevered couplings at the church just a few years previously—years that by then must have felt like lifetimes ago. Then, “I still like you, can you remember?” Denise Borschell, a friend of Paul Butchart’s, commented in his Facebook thread about Levy that Stipe changed this line during a 1999 performance to “I still love you, can you remember?”

There is a lot to unpack in Stipe’s comments from the Interview piece. Most surprising of these is the assertion that he didn’t find his voice until after the accident.

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